Highland Capital Partners

Gemvara has been trying to crack into the jewelry business for nearly 10 years by letting people customize their baubles. Now, it’s hoping to grow its sales by resetting old stones that customers already have in their jewelry box.More →

Earlier this year, Highland Capital announced that it would also partner with a pair of MIT PhD students to launch a pilot accelerator in its Cambridge office. Part of the interest in creating Cybersecurity Factory was to help founders overcome the myriad challenges they often face as they try to get off cybersecurity companies off the ground — from making cybersecurity interesting to investors to actually proving that their actually programs work. More →

Making robots sure isn’t cheap. Consider Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based maker of bots meant to work alongside humans in manufacturing and similar industrial jobs: Since its founding in 2008, Rethink has raised a whopping $113.5 million in venture investment. More →

Over the past several months, two PhD candidates in MIT’s CSAIL program have been busy attempting to solve a few tough questions: How do you make cybersecurity sexy? How can you create excitement about the field? And perhaps most importantly, how do you take the impressive work being done at academic institutions and find ways to bring it to market?More →

In mid-April, TechBreakfast — a monthly opportunity for entrepreneurs, business owners, and investors to gather in an informal environment — is hosting its largest Boston-area event with its first local Ask a VC breakfast at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge.More →

HourlyNerd, the Boston-based online consulting service company, is not shy about its aspirations. After announcing today that it has received $7.8 million in new funding, co-founder Rob Biederman was quite bullish on the company’s prospects.

“What we are trying to do with our technology product is far from trivial,” Biederman explained. “For 90 years, McKinsey [well-known consulting firm McKinsey & Company] has done what we are doing with extremely talented, intelligent people with 30 or 4o years of experience. And we are trying to do that with a piece of technology.”More →

One of Boston’s highest-profile robotics companies announced in a federal filing this week that it has collected almost $27 million in fresh funding. Rethink Robotics sells a two-armed robot called Baxter that can be easily trained to perform a variety of tasks. Rethink’s founder is Rodney Brooks, the former MIT professor who co-founded iRobot Corp., and one of its earliest backers was Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos.More →